Featured Science Paper

This paper is the culmination of the fantastic ice core drilling effort to bedrock on James Ross Island. It shows how the climate record and local ice shelf history have been tightly coupled throughout the last 10,000 years. It also indicates that the climate at James Ross Island had been warming for some centuries, meaning that the ice shelves were on the edge when the rapid warming of recent decades started. Finally, it shows that the recent warming is unusual, but statistically not quite unprecedented in the Holocene context. This is something to be upfront about - however if the warming continues for much longer, it will become unprecedented!

In this paper we identified what needed to be done to answer some of the questions that were being generated and used BAS’s expertise to do it and answer our own questions.